treaties that came out of the Paris Peace Conference, for it was
intended that the matter should be reconsidered, when, as, and if
Russia expelled the Bolsheviks and proceeded to hold democratic and
free elections. This brought about the impossible situation that the
Congress could seriously consider regulations as to the position of
Eastern Galicia (Western Ukraine) toward Poland, since the area had
been under Austria-Hungary, but could not and would not take action in
regard to that part of Ukraine which had been under Russian rule prior
to 1914.
The Poles utilized the situation to extend their claims over Western
Ukraine and they obstinately refused to consider any settlement which
would establish a political boundary between Poland and Western
Ukraine, no matter how the case was put forward. Step by step the
Allies moderated their demands, especially since France insisted
stubbornly on backing almost all of the Polish claims. Thus on June
25, the Allied Supreme Council allowed Poland to occupy the territory
up to the Zbruch River with a proviso that the Poles should guarantee
local autonomy and freedom of religion to the non-Polish population.
A little later they again offered to give Poland a twenty-five-year
mandate over Eastern Galicia and to grant a plebiscite at the end of
that time. Then, later in the year, they developed the idea of the
Curzon line to mark the eastern boundary of the country, but there
was also the supplementary idea that if Poland occupied land beyond
this, she might receive it when the future of Russia was settled. In
view of the weak Polish organization, which was only struggling to its
feet and was short of all supplies, this idea that the Poles should
organize a section of Russia by their own efforts could only increase
the Polish claims. It is therefore not surprising in view of the entire
tangle that the Peace Treaties provided no definite eastern boundary
for Poland and in fact do not mention one in the official texts of the
documents.
Everyone seemed unaware of the fact that Eastern Europe was in a
turmoil with many forces competing for the mastery. The statesmen and
still more the masses of the population of the Allied countries knew
little or nothing about these forces. They saw only problems where they
desired to find peace, and public sentiment turned against attempts
to find a difficult but relatively permanent solution to the entire
problem. The world was sick of this continuing struggle but it could
find no way of ending it.
It was against this background that Petlyura and the forces of Ukraine
carried on the struggle during the entire summer of 1919. Yet despite
all of the hardships of the population and the lack of supplies,
Petlyura was able to recover the control of Kiev on August 31. Again he
was unable to hold it, because the Russian army of Denikin moving up
from the south compelled him to evacuate a few days later. On the other
hand, hostile as the Poles were to the Ukrainian national committee,
they were little better pleased at the advance of the White Russian
armies, even though definite hostilities did not break out between the
Poles and the Russian armies.
During these months there were four forces competing in the same
general area. There were the steadily improving Polish forces supported
by the Allies, especially the French, and constantly gaining in numbers
and equipment. There were the White Russian armies with the backing
of all the Allies striving to restore a unified non-Communist Russia.
There were the Red armies pressing down from the north, fighting to
spread Communism and to conquer territory. There were finally the
Ukrainians organized under Petlyura and isolated leaders struggling to
maintain their political independence. All four were hostile to one
another but it was easy to see that the position of the Ukrainians
fighting on their own territory, with no organized base of supplies
outside of the disputed area, was really the most desperate, for they
had no way of recruiting and unifying their forces or of securing
adequate supplies.
Then there broke out an epidemic of typhus. Under this and the
growing pressure of the hostile armies, the Ukrainian forces began to
disintegrate. The government of the Western Ukraine was the first that
was forced into exile, for the Polish hold on Lviv was growing stronger
with every week and the arrival of new and trained Polish troops
allowed them to take over the entire province. The leaders retired into
Romania and then moved to Vienna, where they continued to function as a
government in exile.
At this moment the growing hostility in the rear of Denikin’s White
Russian Army came to a head and this as much as the power of the
Soviets forced him to retreat and retire from the scene. Soon there
was only the Crimea left in the hands of the White Russians. Yet the
damage had already been done. Petlyura and the Ukrainians were not in
a position to take over and organize the territory which Denikin had
evacuated and it passed back into the hands of the Red forces, so that
by the spring of 1920 nearly all of Great Ukraine was in the hands of
the Bolsheviks. Petlyura and the remains of his organized forces were
pushed on to Polish soil and the general cause seemed lost.
Just then Petlyura made an important decision. He signed a treaty of
peace with the Polish government which recognized the Direktoria as the
government of an independent Ukrainian National Republic. This was the
first recognition of Ukraine that had been officially granted since the
Conference of Brest-Litovsk and there were high hopes that something
might be saved from the wreckage of the last years.
The treaty was signed on April 21, 1920 and four days later the Polish
army, with what was left of Petlyura’s forces, marched on Kiev.
There was little effective opposition and on May 6 a division of the
Ukrainian Army and its Polish allies entered the city, almost without
a battle. They even occupied a bridgehead on the east bank of the
Dnyeper, and it seemed as if it would be possible to begin the work of
rebuilding the shattered country.
Again there came disappointment. The Polish forces far outnumbered
those actually under Ukrainian command. The sight of the Poles in Kiev
annoyed and angered many of the more ardent Ukrainians and they blamed
Petlyura for his alliance and for his abandonment of Western Ukraine.
Memories of the century-long hostility with the Poles were stirred up
and the actions of some of the Poles increased the tension. The result
was that Petlyura was not able to secure rapidly the support that he
had hoped for among the Ukrainian population, especially as Kiev was
still filled with Russian refugees and sympathizers, many of whom
preferred the Bolsheviks as a government in Moscow to the Ukrainians.
At the same time the Polish military situation was none too brilliant.
Under the influence of the military tactics of the World War and its
elaborate trench systems, little attention was paid to the service
of supply behind the lines and the armies at the front were poorly
supplied. Liaison between the various armies and divisions was bad and
there was a possibility that an energetic attack by the Bolsheviks
might jeopardize the situation.
This did happen early in June, just one month after Petlyura resumed
the attempt to organize the government and the Ukrainian army. The
cavalry force of General Budenny succeeded in crossing the Dnyeper and
placing itself in the Polish rear. The Poles were immediately forced to
retreat and they abandoned Ukraine. Petlyura and his men had to retire
with them and Kiev passed back into Bolshevik hands.
The results were worse than at any time before, for while the Poles
held well within the province of Eastern Galicia or Western Ukraine
and Lviv was not seriously menaced, another Soviet attack from the
north swept to the very outskirts of Warsaw. Here the Bolsheviks were
definitely stopped in a great battle on the Vistula, between August
13 and 20, and they were thrown back in a disastrous rout. The Poles
followed them almost as rapidly as they retreated and by October 12
had recovered nearly all the territory that they had held before the
advance on Kiev. Then an armistice was signed, and this was followed by
the Treaty of Riga which determined the frontiers between Poland and
the Soviets until 1939.
In this agreement Ukraine was entirely forgotten. Poland held on to
Western Ukraine substantially in the form in which it had existed
under Austro-Hungarian rule and it acquired a considerable stretch of
Ukrainian land to the east. In return the government dissociated itself
from the efforts of the Ukrainians to secure independence and Great
Ukraine was again deprived of any possibility of foreign assistance.
Petlyura was forced into exile with the whole of the Directoria, and
only unorganized and scattered bands continued to carry on a futile
and hopeless struggle against the Red armies.
Thus, after more than three years of diplomacy and of fighting, the
hopes of the Ukrainians to be masters in their own house were dashed
to the ground. Their endeavors to create a democratic republic had
ended only in disaster. Their leaders were dead or in exile and the
population were helpless in the hands of their new masters. It was
a sad and discouraging ending to a gallant attempt to profit by the
collapse of the two great Empires that had long held them in subjection
and had attempted to eliminate them from political life.
It is easy to criticize the actions of the Ukrainian people and their
governments during this troublous time and to point out that all too
often they paralleled some of the more unsatisfactory aspects of the
behavior of the Kozak Host in the seventeenth century. Yet this is
hardly fair, for the dilemma of Ukraine standing alone was exactly
that of all the other states in the area. A large part of the peasant
population were far more interested in the solution of agrarian
problems, of land reform, etc. than they were in the purely national
revolution. They did not realize that the two had to be carried on
simultaneously and they could not visualize all the changes that were
being introduced into the country.
Their dilemma was only increased by the long period of hesitation on
the part of the Great Powers at Paris and elsewhere. These wavered so
continuously between support of Russian unification and aid to the
various separatist groups that they were unable to exert their full
power to bring about any satisfactory settlement. Step by step they had
allowed the Russian Bolsheviks to infiltrate into the various national
republics that had been set up, and finally only Finland and the three
Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which had direct
access to the sea, survived. At the same time their policy had failed
to gain support for the White Russians even in purely Russian territory
and had only succeeded in producing exactly the opposite results of
what they wished.
It might seem that the Ukrainian problem had thus been settled in a
way that was to be permanent. Yet it had become more serious than
before and it had been definitely pushed on to the international arena,
whether they wished it or not. Exactly as the Kozak wars had removed
Ukraine from a purely Polish problem, so now the Ukrainian ghost was to
be present at all international gatherings, whether it was mentioned or
not. It is not too much to say that the final collapse of the Ukrainian
national government awoke far larger masses of the population to the
reality of the question than had even the Ukrainian declaration of
independence, and for that reason the name of Ukraine began to play an
even more important role on the map of Europe than it had done before.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
_WESTERN UKRAINE_
By the summer of 1919 Polish military control had been extended over
the whole of Western Ukraine and the alliance between Petlyura and the
Polish government early in 1920 ratified the dismemberment of the joint
state which had been so enthusiastically proclaimed a year before.
Finally the Treaty of Riga between Poland and the Soviets secured from
the latter the recognition of Polish control.
There remained only one hope for the exiled government of Western
Ukraine, and that was the Council of Ambassadors of the victorious
Allies. They held out as did the Peace Conference against Polish
control of the country but their opposition steadily diminished. France
was strongly backing Poland and the Conference as a whole had no
definite ideas as to the future. It definitely awarded Western Galicia
to Poland, but on November 20, 1919 there was adopted a resolution
providing that Poland should hold Eastern Galicia for twenty-five years
under a mandate from the League of Nations, that there should be an
Eastern Galician Diet with a representative in the Polish cabinet, that
there should be broad autonomy for the province, and that at the end of
the period there should be a plebiscite. Poland naturally refused to
accept this solution and there was no one of the Allied Powers that was
willing and able to enforce its decision.
The attitude of Poland was unfortunate. The national spirit which
had survived the dismemberment of the country and had even under
desperate conditions been able to rouse the country to the recovery
of its liberty was firmly imbued with the spirit of the past. During
the centuries of Polish greatness, the Poles had been unwilling to
concede any rights to the Ukrainians. They had never been able to solve
the problems of the Kozak Host and they had been bitterly opposed to
the Orthodox Church. Just as the failure to create a working agreement
with the Ukrainians during the seventeenth century had precipitated
the disastrous Kozak wars which had broken the state, so there was
still an unwillingness to recognize that conditions in 1919 were also
fundamentally different from those in 1600. The spirit of continuity
was so strong that no Polish statesman could remain in power for a
single instant if he cast any reflection on the policy of the old
Poland in regard to its neighbors. The Polish control of Galicia during
the Austrian regime merely confirmed them in the consciousness of their
own rectitude.
The proclamation of the Republic of Western Ukraine in 1918 and the
resulting struggle between the Poles and the Western Ukrainians only
increased the bitterness which had been developed by history. At the
same time, the brief taste of independence on the part of Western
Ukraine had also given the Ukrainians an increased sense of their own
dignity, their own unity and their national identity. The ambiguous
position adopted by the Peace Conference served only to convince both
parties that they were well within their rights and served to make any
reconciliation still more difficult.
It is not at all impossible that the history of Europe would have been
very different, if in 1919 there had been on the scene and in control
men of the breath of vision of Hadiach, whereby Rus’ was recognized
as a third component part of a Great Poland, on a par with Poland and
Lithuania. The Soviet occupation of Eastern Ukraine was really leaving
Western Ukraine to itself; with its bitter opposition to Communism and
proper diplomacy it might have joined a great federation which would
have solved the problem of eastern Europe. No one of any prominence
put forward or even tried to secure a hearing for any such plan,
and it is hard to see what would have been the position of Western
Ukraine, had the proposal to grant it a plebiscite twenty-five years
in the future been carried out. It could only have meant a continued
unsettlement in policy and can become intelligible only if it is
assumed that the Conference at Paris believed that within that time
the entire Ukrainian problem would have been settled and that Eastern
Galicia or Western Ukraine would then vote itself into union with
the rest of the country. If that is true, then there is the further
question as to why the Conference bound itself so strictly to its
furtherance of the White Russian armies and the unity of Russia that
it refused to send supplies to the Ukrainian forces who were still
struggling against the overwhelming power of the Reds.
Whatever may have been the motives back of the actions at Paris,
the Poles determined to produce a unified state in which the power
would be entirely in Polish hands. They realized that a considerable
portion of the Ukrainians living in Eastern Galicia had already been
Polonized, that, for example, the brother of Archbishop Sheptitsky was
the Chief of Staff in the Polish army, and they still believed that
in a relatively few years the restored Poland could so accelerate the
process that the province would be thoroughly absorbed into a unified
state.
As a result, during the formative years, the Constituent Diet of Poland
was elected at a time when Western Ukraine was still in arms in support
of its own government and hence there was no reason why the Ukrainians
should vote in the Polish elections. Thus in the formation of the
Polish Constitution they had no vote and the power rested entirely in
the hands of the Polish nationalists who were the strong supporters
of a centralized state. Even later, in 1922 since under the decree of
the Peace Conference, Eastern Galicia was supposed to have its own
independent Diet, the Ukrainians again declined to vote for delegates
to the Polish Diet, contrary to the decrees of the Peace Conference
and the Council of Ambassadors that continued its work. There was thus
produced an impasse between the Polish and Ukrainian points of view
which could only add to the general bitterness and this required the
most careful handling on the Polish part.
In the fall of 1922, the Polish Diet did go so far as to pass a law
providing for the creation of a special regime in the provinces of
Lviv, Ternopil and Stanislaviv. Under this there was to be in each
province a Polish and a Ukrainian diet which was to have certain powers
dealing with local conditions and the ability to act separately on
matters pertaining to one nationality. It was also provided that there
should be founded a Ukrainian university. All these reforms were to
be inaugurated within two years. It would have been an improvement on
conditions as they then were, but it was far from the regime visualized
by the Peace Conference and certainly was not an answer to the
Ukrainian demands.
These reforms, however, were never carried into practice, for on March
14, 1923, the Council of Ambassadors yielded completely, and formally
granted Eastern Galicia to Poland with the statement that Poland
recognized that autonomy was needed in the area and that by signing the
treaty providing for the rights of minorities, she had bound herself to
do all that was needed. To all intents and purposes, this decision gave
Poland a free hand. The exiled government of Western Ukraine formally
protested and there were enormous demonstrations in Lviv and elsewhere
against it, but there was nothing to be done. Once the unification had
been achieved, Poland felt herself free to proceed as if nothing had
happened. There was henceforth no talk in Warsaw of any autonomy for
Eastern Galicia.
Even before this, the Polish government had interfered with all
Ukrainian cultural and financial institutions. It had even placed in
custody Archbishop Sheptitsky when he returned from a trip to America
in 1921, despite the influence that he exerted on the Ukrainians to
maintain public order. It had carried out its claims that the Ukrainian
movement was essentially a subversive movement, even though at the time
there was a certain recognition of the privileged status of Eastern
Galicia by the same international organs that were responsible for the
creation of Poland itself.
The recognition of Eastern Galicia as part of Poland in 1923 presented
the Western Ukrainians with a new situation. They had henceforth to
decide whether to accept their position as a definite part of Poland
or to continue to struggle for independence. The latter position
was taken by the Ukrainian Military Organization, headed by Col.
Evhen Konovalets, a former regimental commander. This body carried
out various acts of terrorism against individual members of the
Polish government who were prominent in the suppression of Ukrainian
activities. Another group, composed largely of intellectuals, like
Professor Hrushevsky, accepted the invitation of the Ukrainian Soviet
Republic to transfer the centre of their activities to Kiev. Professor
Hrushevsky left Vienna, where much of the Ukrainian organized activity
had been concentrated. The vast majority, however, began to tend toward
such activity in the Polish state as they were permitted, without for
a moment giving up the right of Ukraine to its independence in the
future. Thus in 1923 the Ukrainians took part in the Polish elections
and a considerable number took their seats in the Diet, while their
leader, Dmytro Levitsky, declared publicly that they had not renounced
their ideals of independence and that they considered all treaties
denying the rights of the Ukrainian people to national independence to
be without any legal basis.
From year to year the struggle changed its form as various measures
were put into effect by the Polish government to break down the solid
block of Ukrainians living in Eastern Galicia and to introduce Poles
into the area. Thus the Poles in their laws for breaking up large
estates settled on these estates groups of Polish veterans in the
hope that they might destroy the Ukrainian voting majority. They
banned the use of Ukrainian in other than the three provinces in
which the Ukrainians were a majority. They refused any steps toward
the organization of a Ukrainian university and they did their best to
limit the number of schools in which Ukrainian was used as the language
of instruction. Again and again they initiated movements to close
Ukrainian cultural, economic and even athletic organizations by arguing
that they were merely being used for subversive activities.
During the early years after the War, the relations between
Czechoslovakia and Poland were badly strained. The Czechs accused
the Poles of inciting the Slovaks and in return they opened their
own institutions to offer refuge to the Ukrainians from Eastern
Galicia. There was established at Prague a Ukrainian Free University,
a Ukrainian Historical and Philological Society, a Union of Ukrainian
Physicians of Czechoslovakia, a Museum of Ukraine’s Struggle for
Liberation, and a Ukrainian Agricultural School at Podebrady. While
these were ostensibly open to Ukrainians of all regions, they were
for all intents and purposes largely catering to people from Eastern
Galicia who had fled from Polish rule.
The Ukrainian cause was kept alive before the League of Nations and
other international bodies by a continuous stream of protests against
Polish atrocities against the Ukrainians. These reached their height in
1930, when the Polish army was sent into the Ukrainian areas to pacify
the population and the acts of repression and cruelties practiced upon
the village populations increased. Ukrainian institutions of every kind
were closed, concentration camps were established, and the country was
on the verge of a real revolt. Again an appeal was taken to the League
of Nations, and in 1931 the League decided after some hearings that
there was no direct persecution but that many of the Polish officials
were undoubtedly showing excessive zeal in carrying out their orders.
It was the kind of decision that could not settle the situation and
restore peace to the area, for the Poles still insisted that the
Ukrainians were and of right ought to be loyal Polish subjects, even
though they were refused any positions of authority in the Ukrainian
areas and very few were admitted to the Polish University of Lviv.